Professional Discipline Defense Attorney in Kansas and Missouri Advises Medical Professionals to Avoid Burnout and Fatigue to Reduce Potential Licensing Discipline

Medical care should revolve around the patient, and at one time, it did. Increased regulation, additional demands on time, mounting documentation, and other administrative obligations can distract medical professionals from performing their duties competently. Consequently, medical professionals have experienced burnout. Doctors must conquer increased demands for documentation, declining wages while workloads increase, and the quality of life, along with job satisfaction and fulfillment, decline readily.

Burnout, or the state of mental and physical exhaustion coupled with the belief that there is no end in sight, is not singular to the healing arts. Many professional licensees experience burnout because of demands on the professional’s time compounded by performing ancillary tasks associated with their profession. Most professionals will be stressed out or one time in their professional lives.

Few people ever recognize the bureaucratic demands of their chosen profession until they join the ranks. Once young professionals experience bureaucratic requirements, and burnout begins to creep into their minds, the professional starts to feel unappreciated, disillusioned, dispirited, and depressed. These feelings can lead to depression, quitting the profession, and thoughts of committing suicide. To be sure, about 400 doctors take their lives each year. Moreover, well over one-half of all medical professionals participating in a survey admitted that they experienced at least one known symptom of burnout within the previous year.

Malpractice lawsuits and complaints to medical licensing boards significantly increase the stress a medical practitioner experiences. The constant threat of being sued over a mistake requires doctors to increase the amount of documentation they must complete to protect themselves, and more specifically their malpractice insurers. Doctors also complain that patient care is faceless because medical practitioners are held hostage by insurance companies and for-profit medical companies who are exclusively concerned with revenues. Accordingly, medical licensees must devote more time to other matters besides patient care, which was the inspiration to enter the profession in the first place.

Experts say that burnout is the primary cause of medical mistakes. The mistakes doctors, nurses, physician’s assistants, nurse practitioners, and other medical licensees come with a human cost. Patients of burned-out doctors can feel unsafe and lose trust in the practitioner. Patients who advocate for the standard of healthcare they deserve may need to report a physician who is making errors, falling behind, becoming aggravated, displaying a lack of empathy, or committing malpractice.

Hospitals and corporate providers pay lip service to the growing burnout problem. Some facilities try to tackle the problem by imploring their caretakers to forge on and be persistent even in the face of excruciating mental and emotional exhaustion. Other facilities have turned to alternative therapies like yoga to encourage their professionals to relax. The paradox is inescapable: medical facilities are content treating symptoms rather than the underlying cause of the problem. Medical schools and training programs have increased their attention to burnout in their curricula and during internships and residencies. The success of early burnout intervention has not been evaluated. Anecdotally, doctors have said that their time is better spent addressing patient needs or taking a full day away from the office instead of compulsory attendance at a program designed to reduce stress. Compelled attendance only serves to increase tension.

Burnout among medical practitioners cannot be eliminated or even reduced with one tactic. Given the declining number of physicians in practice and the anticipated need for healthcare workers in the future stakeholders must take a holistic approach to repair a broken system so that the healthcare providers can focus on complete care for their patients.

For Help With Your Medical Licensing Issues

Call Kansas and Missouri Professional Licensing Attorney Danielle Sanger today at 785-979-4353 to schedule a consultation if you are a medical professional licensee facing discipline attributed to burnout. You can rely on Attorney Sanger’s vast experience to protect you, your profession, your family, and your way of life.

Source: Cited and I have a friend who is a physician in his second intern year at Ohio State University. He told me about compelled attendance at stress reduction conferences and said that all they do is increase stress.

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